Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven't given up trying.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different,' in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

Just like the Alamo, somebody damn well needed to go to their aid. Well, by God, I'm going to Viet Nam's aid!

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

You aren't learning anything when you're talking.

Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.

Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

The job, of course, will never be finished. For a nation, as for an individual, education is a perpetually unfinished journey, a continuing process of discovery.

Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.

Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone's achievement.

I'll have those n**gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

I'm gonna hunker down like a jack rabbit in a dust storm

The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing. For, though in every age there are some who, by bold adventures, or by favorable accidents, rise suddenly to riches, yet it is dangerous to indulge hopes of such rare events; and the bulk of mankind must owe their affluence to small and gradual profits, below which their expense must be resolutely reduced.

The Organization of American States couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath.

This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Democrats legislate; Republicans investigate.

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.

Did you ever think that making a speech on economy is a lot like pissing down your leg? It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

No member of our generation who wasn't a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

'If you let a bully come in and chase you out of your front yard, he'll be on your porch and the next day he'll rape your wife in your own bed.